 Good day, May 40th here. I think I found that the secret to properly using this gimbal and That is to power it up That the gimbal seems to work a ton better When it's got power who would have thought so Here we go. This is the Queen Elizabeth. Look at that ship That's amazing and Sydney Arbor Right, let's do it. Let's do it. I quite have this gimbal thing down. I'm gonna get it down. Here we go This way a bit I was thinking of taking a guided tour of Sydney What the hell man? You're taking the guided tour of Sydney Just too expensive, right? I give it a walking tour of 35 bucks Australian 20 bucks American Bit dear I was looking at the the comments and One of them said our Luke thinks it's some kind of major crime against humanity To get up in a seat on an airplane But when every seat is taken on an airplane If everyone was getting up obviously the chaos so you want to minimize how often you get up then if you have to Two people in the row have to get up at the same time as you then You want to minimize what you do to other people. So yeah, you need to take into account the effect of your choices and other people But On my 15 hour plane ride over absolutely jam-packed I've never taken an ocean cruise Looks delightful So there isn't exactly a bad part of Sydney like Jim Bowden Like laughed at me when I said like, you know, where are the parks where there are the gang wars? Not allowed not a lot of bad parts of Sydney So you can feel free to go and walk about Without worrying about the absolute disaster Might be for you Steven James He just retweeted me So, you know Luke Ford taking the maximalist no-wank position, you know blaring no-wank propaganda Manly Beach Yeah, Steven James got my number, but I didn't have the number of this gimbal I need some quality content here Can't just be all Light-hearted for Volody Let's bring the quality content here. I'm sure those are all the problems and concerns and grievances from for example So this is Misha sauce podcast is interviewing author of the Napoleonic Wars And by its Misha and the author from the country of Georgia Our Georgian citizens who are of a Azerbaijani background Armenian background or even You've probably seen reports of a of tensions and many concerns and difficulties. So that's one issue the second is that Georgians at the moments of this kind of historic importance They show remarkable resilience and ability to unite So that is not something that Georgians are particularly known for Hey, by the way, just incidentally, whatever happened the worldwide web So whenever I try to go anywhere on the internet on my iPhone It always asked me to download some app Then that Floating worldwide web where we're all connected across the internet. It's been walled off into all these various beat-ups. That's right. There is a lot of Egos involved in Georgian character historic planets, you know, you can say stereotypically are very proud men proud individuals Very individualistic individuals, but they're Okay, are there any people who aren't proud Seriously, it seems like almost all people are proud and It's like saying that someone's strong, right? Mortonier the Christian psychiatrist wrote a great book called the strong and the weak my stepmother loved this book, but All those people are strong and proud Well, they're weak and ashamed in other areas, right? Nobody's strong in all areas. Nobody's proud in all areas So people may put up a strong and proud front in some things There are going to be tons of other things where they're ashamed and weak So what's the best way to quickly bond with someone right to have a common enemy Right to bemoan someone to gossip about someone. That's the quickest way to bond That's the quickest way to bond and unite a fractious people Right to unite a fractious people against a common enemy right so nationalism and Almost all group identities are primarily about what we're not Unifying to oppose an outside threat to oppose an outgroup So having hated outgroups is the quickest way to bond your ingroup So this is unique to Jews or the blacks or the Christians or the Georgians You see that especially 16 17 18 centuries When when Georgians are capable of doing it and of course, I think the third important factor will be the ruling and lease ability to navigate the great power Kind of power struggles, so you see often time. So life is about navigation, right? Sometimes there's room for assertion sometimes There's room for a definitive statement But almost always in life. You're navigating between powers greater than yourself When it comes to this live stream, I'm the boss of this live stream But most of the things after kind of go along to get along after navigate between powers greater than myself And the only way I can afford these vacations is that I'm staying for free with friends and relatives Right, so I navigate those relationships with care. I Don't want to be an unwanted guest Georgian elites siding with one power So how do elites stay in power right they form alliances with other groups so For elites to have power it helps to have a multicultural divided society so in America today the elites Largely aligned with the bottom of the social hierarchy, right? So the Democratic Party is a high-low combination against the middle which tends to vote Republican So when you have a unified public they can revolt successfully against elites So elite power depends upon a divided country where elites can make strategic alliances This is true in Georgia is true in America is true in Australia Right, so populism is always a passing phenomenon There's no great ideology of populism. They're at universities of populism. There aren't think tanks devoted to populism populism occurs when you have an increasingly unified public the unites against the elite alliance with a Subgroup in your society There is a famous historian Vladimir Minorsky who famously put that Georgians carried Islam very lightly on their shoulders And that was so yeah, it's not just Georgians who can carry Islam very lightly on their shoulders Everyone has the ability to carry their religion lightly or heavily You can use your religion as a bludgeon as a bloody flag that you wave in front of people You can carry your religion in a heavy way so that it distinguishes you from other people It separates you from other people It intimidates it infuriates other people or you can carry your religion lightly In a way that is most likely to lead to harmonious relations with others It was a reference to the fact that Georgian elites frequently converted to Islam out of expedience right so retaining that kind of Christian core belief But also looking so we do things for very mixed motives Everyone is far more nuanced than the picture in our head like we usually know people based on One type of experience with them like experience with them at school experience with them at work Experience with them at the pub experience with them in a particular activity, but people always far more nuanced But it's easier for us to caricature people as good or bad strong or weak So we draw caricatures Just because that's how the human mind works, right? We want to know if someone's a friend or foe and that's reasonably useful, right? Just to know if someone a friend or a foe Sometimes that's just the primary thing you need to know friend or foe. It's a caricature Obviously, they're more complicated than that, but as an economizing device on your time It may be just fine If you require them to convert to Islam just right so when I think back to my conversion to Judaism I didn't realize at the time but in part it was driven by my existential crisis my meaning crisis And what type of people have meaning crisis 99.9% of the time the type of people who have a meaning crisis such as me For those who are socially maladjusted we lack ordinary human connection We're built to spend most of our time with our family and with our relations And then if we have any time after that we spend it with friends Aside from work, right? So if you're occupied with work with family with relatives then with friends, you're not going to have a meaning crisis I got into a meaning crisis because of my stupid vegetarian upbringing which I carried on into my adulthood Which led to terrible health problems and basically being bedridden for six years in my 20s And so people then shied away from me because you know what's with this guy's collapse is a contagious You know, I don't want to be around that you all naturally tend to shy away from the second the week and the suffering and the fallen and the idiots and the losers Right, so I was isolated and that led me to have a meaning crisis Which led me to Judaism luckily the vehicle that led me to Judaism with Dennis Prager who thank God is a fairly moderate Common-sensical guy, so if you're gonna have a hero and if you're gonna have you know someone who Has answers to a meaning problem really helps if they're Well-balanced and I got lucky in that respect, but not just lucky. That is a testament to my own reasonably, you know good sense decision-making It was me who chose Dennis Prager just didn't happen For the sake of conversion they did so and of course you find quite a few examples of it In Georgian history My sense is that Georgians where the history on their sleeve, you know, my I grew up in my my father would proudly tell me of Misha came to Australia when he was four. He's just Started podcasting. I think during COVID started his sub-stack about a year or so ago and He's largely of doing Australia since the age of four So if you have any kind of in-group identity you have all these stories about victory against overwhelming odds every group every team Every religion has these magnificent stories about how they achieve victory against overwhelming odds You know I ever tell you about how I achieve victory against overwhelming odds mate family friend guided me through a range of monasteries that you have a map of Now Turkish territory with Christian monasteries dotted there and you know kind of pining for this moment You know when real Georgian territory and Christian territory would be Reclaimed and it feels yeah, not even talking about such sets you up. I see but so yeah, most people have a holy land All right, it's not just Jews who have a holy land All right, most people have a holy land like ties of blood and soil natural normal and In moderation healthy real ancient history almost it feels very Visceral and real for Jordan's sake in a way I'm not sure we see Yeah Okay, Misha the shorter the question the better When you're when you have a guest the shorter the question the better this is the pitfall of having that kind of relationship with history because We're not the only ones in that sense. I mean Greeks have also this kind of very complex relationship with their past Of course, so the English probably have the most positive relationship to history of any people probably followed by the Jews But the Jews in the English love their history, but I think the English love their history more than any other nation Who's have and nothing more broadly? I mean I have a lot of Iranian friends Well, you know, I would sit down and talk to them in the city that I live in there is a sizeable So I guess while loving your history has good sides and bad sides You can get very easily mired in your history. It can distort life All right, you start seeing things through the prism of The stories you've been told about your history so it can have a distorting effect It can also have a bonding effect a rooting effect. It gets you Feeling that you're part of something transcendent that goes far back in history and likely will go Forward in history beyond your own life It almost always we touch upon and community Beside Sydney Harbour, that's the Sydney Harbour Bridge up there. That's the Sydney Opera House over here Iran and it will discuss it in a sense that just happened, you know two weeks ago So a lot of Jews think oh, you know Jews are unique because you talk about history in a way that it just happened last week You know what happened to our? Patriarch Abraham or Isaac or Jacob like we have an intimate close their present present-day relationship And many may think that's unique But any group with a long history is very likely to have this I think broader Middle East You consider Georgia In many respects part of that why the brother believes have a long very long historical memory It's a relationship with with histories is is different from the more recent nations Such as the United States such as Australia I mean these derisive kind of derisive reference in Georgia that Georgians have trees that as are as old as Australia United States and blessings to Elliot Blatt is a man with history long proud history Man filled with stories of victories against incredible odds Children model yourselves upon Elliot Blatt Has some ring to it, but the problem with that is that we that also kind of makes us captives of the past Any time you have a commitment any time you have a bond is an element of capture You form a good mate Right you form a good relationship You join a community Right you join a group right with every bond there's capture, right? So ties bind and blind That's not original to me. I think that's psychologist Jonathan height ties bind and blind Very frequently when you sit down and talk to Georgia, there is this kind of longing and pining for the good old days Without realizing that those good old days were full of challenges and difficulties That the past is never this straightforward as historical memory makes it so And that is particularly And I'm painful when the level of historical discussion is not where it should be and George is a good case study for So in the Torah God calls upon the Jews to be a holy people Doesn't call upon them to be a people of historians. So you're never going to find a large in group That is primarily composed of historians, right people don't want to know objective history They want stories about how their group overcame against the credible ox You know, you sit and yeah, you go to Georgia you sit at the table everyone says toast that I historically historically Contextualized, but you also realize that 99% of what they're saying is a myth. It's a myth make it's it's it Well, most of what we say is it's a myth, right? Yeah, let's never say what we mean Mean what we say We all cling to caricatures Distortions of reality Like here I am sharing my delusions while you share your delusions It's a beautiful legend that they kind of recurred date time after time after time For all the developments in historical profession that we have had Georgian historiography is still quite quite Quite simple as a sort of means I'll say it's it's it still has Yeah, most national history is simple. It has to be aimed at an average IQ of around 100 It's a lot to learn from western historiography And that's where I you know me and my friends for example What we have done two years ago is create a new graduate history program in georgia Whose goal it is to to educate new generation of georgia students with the western model in mind So when you deal Let's you know that battle that you refer to right that famous So the western model they're talking about here really is the enlightenment model She is a great believer in the power of rationality the buffett autonomous strategic rational self basically good at heart But distorted by Maladaptive traditional folk ways Promise made is a debt unpaid says elliott black a very good point This battle of did gory where ask any torches? Another key part of the enlightenment is the idea that the world is discernible and knowable we can figure things out so Since the enlightenment life has steadily become less and less magical At this less and less mystery and magic In the world around us as people increasingly turn to science for explanations Tell you that there were six hundred thousand So jokes and you know fifty six thousand torches That is It's a fiction It's it's it's a myth And yet it is still accepted by We are powered by myths. I have a greatly exaggerated sense of my own importance I have a greatly exaggerated sense of my own profundity greatly exaggerated sense of my own wisdom I've a greatly exaggerated sense of my own rhetorical powers my own broadcasting powers Like I have a mythological view of myself in my live streaming abilities Given what we would consider serious historians right kind of People who teach at the university level in georgia recite that as as a given fact So that's the problem kind of Georgia's is is crap on one of the many problems but it is For the new generation to challenge to to pull holes in this narrative to point out Uh, the difficulties complexities of the past So there's something I was going to touch on a little later. I recently um, you know, I kind of read probably Doesn't what what two books and biographies of And all the stuff and I noticed um The closer you look um The more complex everything becomes There's a great article on espn Showing that with improved video technology the closer you look at any catch The less it seems like it catch because the more accurate the video the more it looks like a ball is always moving in a receiver's hand Now the more closely you look you know less likely it is that you know, eddie catch is really a catch And a lot of the stories we have Today and a lot of the common knowledge is is not actually it is often myth You know, there's a nice example when I read so we have to Live in a world where we have imperfect information and there will never be a time We just have to have perfect information that we you know fully know what's uh really going on fully and you know the um You know, I'd always thought the the russians had burned Moscow behind them as as they evacuated as as one small Example you would give it to the whole book on this and actually So so you know not to dive in too deep, but you're but basically, you know When I was an accident or I read um incursions biography of hitler Right, so much of what we attribute to the perfidy of others the evil of others is really an accident You comfortable streaming in public and it's more comfortable in Australia than Los Angeles. Yeah, it's much safer, right? You don't have to worry about accidentally Running into someone and they punch you or shoot you or stab you so public space is much safer in Australia particularly Sydney so yeah, a lot easier to live stream outside a lot easier just to feel comfortable and Sydney is plenty diverse, but uh, it's not the kind of diversity that makes you uncomfortable It's not the kind of diversity that fuels huge crime rates homelessness Drug addiction despair Australia doesn't have the number of despair deaths that the united states has Because what we're usually talking about when we talk about diversity is the number of black people and so Australia simply doesn't have A large number of black people, aborigines are just a tiny tiny portion of their population I Don't think I've seen one In the past 10 days in sydney Plain he makes it clear that actually the rachstag fire was not the Nazis and they're sure they're obviously something to advantage over But today I was shocked that Yeah, so a lot of things that we think of the result of evil and other people's you know maliciousness really just an accident These kind of things and so I guess you say Georgian in history his geography is um, you know primitive And maybe we should look to western models and I guess my question to you is is all history fake No, not all history is fake. All right, if you have enough reliable observers Documents, you know evidence of something taking place for example yesterday Green pay packers defeated the dallas cowboys 31 to 28 in overtime. I wasn't there at the game But there are enough reliable sources testifying to that result that I can speaking historically Confirmed that it is absolutely true everything we know today I don't mean this pejoratively, you know kind of miss you miss you just the shorter the question the more powerful the better No You can learn But you know is all is everything we know really Selectively surface to benefit mythmaking, you know for for the for the allies or for the soviets or russians or whatever. No No, all right. Not all history is fake and uh, not all of history is in service of mythmaking How should we think about that? I think that goes to the to the very core of what history is because You know to start with it is not necessarily a hard science. So But it does have hard science contained within it. So I was reading an article in Scientific American about all these new techniques to to deduce I think you know elements of blood proteins on You know ancient material and the way they get to read this ancient material is from custodians of this material using using a rubber or an eraser to get rid of dirt or smudge and then the scientists tests the smudges the the the detritus On the rubbing away of any dirt on these valuable historical documents. You test it and they get hard scientific findings about You know what was going on on that paper 500 years ago 1,000 years ago 2,000 years ago And we will know more and more so documents will increasingly be scientifically studied and you can deduce the health of the person who You know touched these documents You can deduce, you know, if they're diabetes if they were on morphine and so History is very likely to move more and more in a hard science direction and we'll have more and more historians who are experts in The science of these hard documents and what these documents reveal There are certain things that we know happen right there factual things So we know when moral to began we know when Stalin died we know You know when the poland scored Is great victories What makes I think history Very Complex is the subjective interpretation of it And that's where we so I was talking to a psychiatrist the other day and he said psychiatric theories They rarely stand up the psychiatric theories in 1950s and 1960s. They look pretty idiotic today So theories All right subjectivity don't tend to stand up well over time But hard empirical evidence Right that often does stand the test of time. We really are dealing with the process of of creating narratives and then The question arises who writes this narrative right and usually these are individuals or groups who have certain Control level right this is government or elites This is a chronicler. Let's say who writes on the behalf of the king and he selectively Chooses facts right and then writes out things that He considers either superfluous unnecessary unimportant or damaging to the king Or more recently let's say in soviet historiography, right? You You have the government that dictates the line that historians have to follow out of ideological Kind of considerations or in the book that I just finished the biography of Phil Marshall Mikhail Kutuzov you see Can I show in the book how the real person with all his complexities flaws All the words and you know things that makes him human Will be you know, we're white white watched by the soviet historians to create this Edifice of a national hero that looks great As a as a tool of ideology as a tool of kind of aspiring masses, but But it lacks humanity lacks what makes you this alive So that's the challenge, but if you are Looking at the recent kind of 25 30 years You see What we call this kind of revisionist, right? And there are some people complaining about revisionists that they are not gonna be writing history but to me Rewriting history is the part and parcel of what that is what history is about because Every time and we approach as a historian you approach a subject you're approaching it with a different human experience is different world so that reminds me of psychiatry and Psychotherapy right we have the capacity to rewrite You know painful events every time we talk about a painful event from the past or journal about it We change it we change its effect in our mind and so a lot of therapy is about Re framing recasting rewriting Painful traumas to make them less painful and generally speaking by saying These things out loud Right by letting go of our secrets These past traumas become less powerful for us So in 12th step we talk about you're only as sick as your secrets and 12th step has all these Maxims and trite corny sayings, which are really true. They're so profound There is great wisdom to that idea. You're only as sick as your secrets Right that you need to do a complete and thorough moral inventory and share it with someone else Like I found once I share something share it thoroughly That it has much less power over me and I can talk about it without my voice cracking without blushing Right if you can talk about something in a normal tone of voice It means that you've successfully processed it and you can then move on and it doesn't have nearly the thought over you As long as you know what uncle Wally did to you and you're a kid and you can't tell anyone Then it's much more likely to have profound power over you and to walk and distort your relations with You know other men who remind you of uncle Wally, but not everyone Who reminds you of uncle Wally is looking to satimize your backside, mate. So think think positive Different baggage so to speak therefore your vision your evaluation will be slightly different from the one Uh before you and that's why every generation Reassesses history and that's what makes history so unique from other fields of human ever That uh, it's a in many respects a generational reassessment takes place Um, so for example the history books that we took for granted in 1950s and 60s are no longer Um acceptable because uh, they ignore the role of women. They ignore the issue of races, right? They ignore the issue of social Factors so hence we need this new kind of narratives that incorporate This new layers But by doing so we create a more complex vision of the past And that complexity is not what humans really like. Uh, that's why those So I think you become more adaptive More efficient more skilled at dealing with life The more complex your models for both how the world works top down And how you work from the bottom up So the more complex And nuanced your models of reality then The better you're going to be able to Deal with reality and the more effective you're going to be Those national myths that simplify the story you cannot boil it down to an individual event You know kind of factor So resilient because new ones in complexity More you know make orders murky and we don't really want to Look through and peer through this murky environment Yeah, so Yeah, it comes sticking to The change in history and and myth making how has the perception of napalian changed over time? You know, I guess I come on. We should just end end the sentence there You don't have to go on the shorter the sentence the better So I'm going to fast forward here to get to the majority of the Germans basically said not as it was good idea Just Okay, fast forward a minute unlike others. I like Hitler Stalin Oh, and you're really a head of state that you can pick He managed to create A narrative and almost single heavily create a narrative And Louisiana to a certain extent is still run by Napoleonic law That's how great and effect inside that becomes A legend that that that graphs the minds the imaginations of people and then still with us in fact To flip kind of the the Narrative that you're gonna laid out. In fact, Napoleon's Reputation is far was far greater Until I will say 1970s 80s and it is this new revisionist school that starts really doubling down on it so of course to start with Napoleon has a this is a One of a kind life, right? Island Against all odds. He makes it to a great school Then perseveres loses his father takes care of his family then revolution gives him opportunity to shine And then through his share So it was Napoleon good or bad depends on for whom Is strong police in good or bad depends on for whom the three strikes laws Good or bad depends on for whom in california We have ruled that if you take less than $950 you can't be charged with anything more severe than a misdemeanor Is that good or bad? Well, it depends upon for whom Who will power and genius He's able to rise to the very top And then go on a rampage of the likes of which Europe has never seen before, right? The story itself is very conducive to this myth making like this giant this Prometheus So we live in an age of narrative I just read a book on On how we have now have emphasized the power of narrative So George W. Bush when he was introducing his cabinet He talked about how everyone on his cabinet had such an amazing story so In advertising in business everyone wants to tell a story And it becomes tiresome You want to read a news article about some trend and it always begins with an example and you have to go through Three four five six paragraphs about someone This life you don't care about to get to the nut graph In paragraph seven to find out what the story is really about So narratives have power but like everything else they can be overused trying to press print their evolutionary ideals and Is defeated and an exile that like a Prometheus right spends the last few days of his life or last few years of his life on the run so I think The factual material is very very appealing And that's the name the invite book I say I get to Napoleon I got to Napoleon because of this legend because of that vision of him as a martyr fear here You know as a young kid growing in The destruction that was around me by reading about the calling and envisioning myself being in his reigns, right? I was you know in the French army fighting innocent being They power your conservative powers and all that So, yeah, that's kind of my story too. I got away from painting misery of my childhood Retreating to a world of fantasy and books. So while my friends were out with friends I was on my own at home reading books, which is probably why I do so much live streaming and blogging and Writing and reading it's a lifelong habit, but probably some of it comes from social maladjustment And so maybe the professor speaking here Also developed a loner attitude where he retreated to a world of fantasy He also touches on another thing whenever I read a book or watch a sporting event I put myself In the place of the protagonist and when I watch a movie that's kind of me up there on the big screen When I watch the Dallas Cowboys play, that's me. Who's the quarterback or me is Micah Parsons sacking the quarterback So God forbid when I would watch pornography that was me I just said Rocco Safredi's body And it's kind of surprised me that not everyone does this Some people could just watch a sporting event or watch a movie or watch a tv show Without needing to put themselves in the starring role But then as I Became kind of professional historian started looking at you realize the how nuance and complex the reality is The poland of the ruthless Operator very callous You know, he's very pragmatic he You know, he creates what we can call the modern police state not Okay, so everyone's nuanced. All right, there's people we think of, you know, great grand people They have to make moral compromises just like the rest of us All right, they They fail in some areas, you know, they're wracked by insecurity weakness fear And no one's strong and competent in everything Everything's more complicated the more closely you look everyone is more complicated everything is more nuanced Luckily, I'm here to disentangle it for you not necessarily to the extent of totalitarian system so far for Nazi Germany and Soviet Union, but certainly The foundation of the surveillance state is within all start with Napoleon I didn't know that the foundation the police state and the surveillance state started with Napoleon You you see him, right? Doing things that are very very awkward To to can it be To be acceptable to 21 and 20 Khalia Platt says when he watches a movie or a tv show He's more likely to identify with the extras. Well, I did extra work on probably 30 or 40 tv shows and movies, but When I watch these things, I almost never think about the extras 20 second 20 second on 21st century the restoration of slavery The latent racism that he shows, right? So Napoleon expanded freedom for some people and he reduced freedom for others Donald Trump probably expanded freedom for some people reduced freedom for others civil rights legislation Expanded freedom for some groups reduced freedom for other groups So all those make things of course complex and yet his reputation in yours in yours because Because of that very fact that he's a complex figure that he's not just black and white Now his reputation endures because they had such a major impact. It's not because he's a nuanced figure. Everyone is nuanced Okay on with my walkabout. Bye. Bye